The US government's Office of Science and Technology Policy is hosting a forum …

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Last Thursday, the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy launched a public forum to allow the public to provide feedback into a potential expansion of the US government's open access policy for scientific research. Right now, the National Institutes of Health is the only agency that requires recipients of its funding to make any scientific papers available to the public within a year of the publication date. For the next month, the OSTP will be soliciting feedback on whether and how the policy should be extended to other federal agencies.

The NIH's open access policy started out as voluntary; researchers who received NIH funding were encouraged to send papers in for the NIH to host. That was generally considered a flop. Researchers are typically more focused on actual research, and not well versed in copyright issues, meaning the NIH's archive was poorly populated. Eventually, Congress stepped in, and made the policy mandatory: any publication funded by NIH research had to be sent into the agency's archive within a year of publication.

So far, the change has generally been considered successful, although there has been a significant backlash from some in the publishing industry, and the law that made it possible has been the subject of Congressional turf battles.

In any case, the OSTP considers the policy to be in keeping with the Obama administration's open government initiatives (the OSTP blog entry was cross-posted to the OGI blog), and is considering a significant expansion. To that end, the policy discussion will focus on whether the NIH's open access initiative should be expanded to include other agencies and, if so, which ones. The NSF, which distributes grants in much the same way that the NIH does, would be the obvious choice. But many other agencies, such as the Departments of Energy and Interior, NASA, NOAA, the EPA, and the NIST all employ scientists that publish on a regular basis, and are obvious candidates for a similar policy.

The initiative is going well beyond a simple consideration of which agencies to include. Discussions will run into early next year (each will get its own entry at the OSTP blog), and include considerations of how to format the materials, how they're made accessible, and how to measure both compliance and the utility of making the material available.

One problem with the documents at the website is that they don't make a clear distinction between the publications that are based on research funded by federal agencies and the data behind the research itself. A more informative description of the different materials can be found in the Federal Register, which published the official request for input. "The results of government-funded research can take many forms, including data sets, technical reports, and peer-reviewed scholarly publications, among others," that document notes. "This RFI focuses on approaches that would enhance the public’s access to scholarly publications resulting from research conducted by employees of a Federal agency or from research funded by a Federal agency."

So, for the moment at least, the OSTP is focusing strictly on publications, and not on providing access to the raw data produced during the course of these studies (although that may be subject to separate disclosure policies, depending on the agency and material). It's a rather significant distinction to make, given the recent controversy over the availability of climate data that was used to produce several peer-reviewed studies.

In any case, the actual format of the material may ultimately be just as important as which agencies are included. The ability to ingest data from these publications and make it accessible to text mining and meta-analysis that crosses disciplines has the potential to open new avenues for research and provide a higher scientific return on the public's investment.